Thoughts on the Fifth Anniversary of Leaving the European Union

What did you do in the Brexit wars, Daddy?

Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart

-From Henry V, Act IV, Scene 3

On this date five years ago, at around 6pm, I was on my way home from work having popped into Fenwick’s, Newcastle’s finest department store, to buy a celebratory bottle of whisky (15 year old Springbank, since you’re asking). The 31st of January, you see, was Brexit Day - and I was pleased about it.

Taking a shortcut through M&S, I bumped into a friend who I knew to be a fellow Leave-voting academic (yes, there are some); we had a jovial conversation about the feeling of great relief that had surged through the nation - I think including most people who had voted Remain - now that, for good or ill, the nonsense was finally over and we could get on with our lives. All of it - the ‘second referendum’; the MPs singing protest songs in Parliament; the odious braying of John Bercow; the legislative shenanigans; the conspiring between Remain-voting Parliamentarians and their EU counterparts; Gina Miller and Jolyon Maugham; the relentless flow of ‘despite Brexit’ news stories; Ed Davey bellowing inane things into loudhailers at Whitehall rallies; everybody becoming overnight experts on things like Euratom and the use of Henry VIII clauses; ‘hard' and ‘soft’ and ‘red, white and blue’ Brexit; Rory f***ing Stewart and his citizens’ assemblies - all of it was gone forever; all of it had been consigned to the dung heap of history where it well and truly belonged.

I had nothing against Remain voters, you understand. How could I? Almost everybody I knew was in that category. And I well understood the arguments in favour of remaining. I had resented being forced to make a binary choice; I was essentially against Britain’s membership of the EU but I thought a referendum was a foolish way of deciding the issue one way or the other. I had sympathy with the idea that Britain was better in a club than off on its own in an ocean full of sharks, and I also felt that a strong conservative case could be made for remaining in the EU as opposed to upending the apple cart and leaving.

And yet when push had come to shove I had chosen the ‘Leave’ option because, in the end, everything the EU does gestures towards everything that is dangerous in what Nietzsche called ‘great politics’ - the urge to make a new Europe through the concerted efforts of an elite pan-continental caste of ‘good’ Europeans. This, as I saw it, was a manifestation of a theme in European history dating back millennia and identified in François Guizot’s The History of Civilisation in Europe, which warns of a centralising impulse animating European politics against its true spirit. Europe is, for geographical reasons, not meant to achieve political unity, and yet it eternally strives for it - and it is in that striving that it courts disaster.

Faced with the choice to ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’, in other words, I felt it had to be ‘Leave’, because I think the very existence of the EU will doom, and is dooming, the population of the continent. The project will fail and in the failing will bring about catastrophe. The European peoples are better off without it. There were no hard feelings, in other words - there was just a vote, and a choice exercised, on my part in view of what I considered to be prudent in the long run.

And as I said goodbye to my friend and walked out into the January night, I did so in a mood of genuine optimism. It seemed to me that something important had been achieved that went far beyond finally - finally! - achieving the referendum result. We had created a set of conditions that were necessary, if not in themselves sufficient, for national renewal. We could control our own destiny again - not the least important aspect of this being that we once again had a political class who, unlike was the case when we were in the EU, we could thoroughly reject through the ballot box.

Even more importantly than that, though, I felt we had managed to pass through a genuine crisis relatively unscathed. It had been a political crisis - Jeremy Corbyn came within a hair’s breadth of becoming Prime Minister in 2017; John McDonnell almost became Chancellor; and in 2018-2019 our governing class almost managed to conspire to overturn the result of a national referendum. But the problems had gone far deeper than that - we had witnessed a constitutional crisis in the true sense, in that the order which the ‘some’ imposed upon the ‘many’, as they do in any regime, had been radically destabilised by a fundamental opposition between those two groups. Parliament, and the governing class as a whole, had wrenched itself out of alignment with what most of the population either wanted (in the form of ‘Leave’ voters) or felt ought to happen (the great bulk of ‘Remainers’). And its very legitimacy had been put at risk as a result.

But the fever had broken before serious damage had been done, or so it seemed to me that January evening. Our constitutional arrangements - the basic Diceyan idea (completely misunderstood by most MPs, the Supreme Court, and political commentators) that Parliament is supreme only because and insofar as it represents the electorate, who are sovereign - had won through. The voters had exercised their constitutional role at the end of 2019 and commanded Parliament to represent them. And Parliament now did. This had healed the rift between the ‘some’ and the ‘many’ in our regime, it seemed to me, and we could now look forward to at least a potential new era of genuine political representation in government.

Five years is a long time in politics, though, and it’s fair to say that a bunch of stuff has happened since that night. The period of optimism lasted just over a month, until the Covid era began, and things have never been quite the same since.

And this has cast the entire Brexit farrago in a fresh light. It no longer feels anything like the beginning of a period of national renewal but rather something more akin to what in military parlance would be described as a reconnaissance-in-force: an attack which provokes the enemy into revealing its strength. For what the ‘Leave’ vote, and Boris Johnson’s eventual triumph, seemed to in the end achieve was only the revelation of the extent to which British institutions have been hollowed out and corrupted. It showed our governing classes to be more loyal to the values of transnationalism and globalism than to the people who they purport to serve and represent (and who largely fund their salaries), and more interested in imposing their own will - and their own vision of the national interest - on society than giving effect to what their fellow countrymen and -women actually want. And what we have seen since January 31st 2020 has only seemed to confirm the grip of that class, and the imposition of their will, on British national life - with our current government doing little but buttress that trend.

In the period after 2016 I frequently found myself irritated with the lazy and glib way that people on either side of the Atlantic drew connections between Brexit and the first election of Donald Trump, partly because that seemed to me to obscure the many differences between the Brexit and MAGA movements, and partly because it was so naked an attempt to smear both as a sort of emergent populist axis of evil threatening to flood the world with fascism, disinformation, and bad juju.

Yet in retrospect the parallels do become obvious. Trump came to power in 2017 imagining that he could govern as a President in the ordinary way, and discovered that when he pulled levers he mostly got inactivity or aggressive pushback. Boris Johnson’s government seemed to experience the same thing from a clearly resentful - even vengeful - civil service (not to mention many Tory MPs). In both circumstances the expectation among the winners was that in the aftermath of a political victory the other side would respond to defeat in good faith. They thought in other words that they had been engaged in something like a chess match, the loss of which the eventual loser would accept with a smile and a handshake. What they found instead was that they had just fought out the opening exchanges in a knife-fight. This was not the old politics; they were in the world now of Carl Schmitt, not Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. And this confused and deflated them.

The question now - setting all substantive matters concerning Trump 2.0 to one side - is whether the British ‘populist’ right will respond in the same way to their current predicament as their American counterparts did to similar circumstances in 2021. Whether or not Trump will be a good President in the long run, the way he has gone about his second term so far is indicative - as I have previously written - of a very serious and sustained effort on the part of the American conservative intellectual elite to think through the political goals they want to achieve, the broad strategy that will help achieve them, and the tactics that will realise them in practice. And there is no doubt that they underwent that effort in view of what that first, abortive reconnaissance-in-force revealed in 2017-2020 about the nature of what they were up against. Is it within the hearts and heads of the British right to undertake that sort of an endeavour, in view of what the damp squib of Brexit showed them? Can they use the consequences of their previous failings to plan effectively for a reclamation of power? And can - this is the question on everybody’s lips - the desperately hoped-for national renewal then, finally, follow?